Posted on 04/30/2005 5:18:22 PM PDT by aculeus
A humanoid robot has been attending a nursery school in California since March to play with children up to 2 years of age.
The experiment is hoped to help develop a robot that can "live in harmony with humans in the future".
Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories' Qrio robot spends time each day with more than 10 toddlers at the nursery school located in San Diego.
The project is being conducted in collaboration with the University of California.
"We want to continue (the experiment) more than six months to collect data," Sony Intelligence researcher Fumihide Tanaka said.
all the children are going to be talking like robots when they get into the first grade
Watch the videos at Sony's site. It's pretty awesome.
Wierd. Kinda reminds me of once (long ago) when I was on helpdesk. A woman told me (quite sternly) that if I ever doubted if there were a god why on earth would he have given us the ability to create such marvels. I kind of laughed it off at the time.
Fast forward a few years and that statement keeps on coming back to mind when I see stuff like this. Guess what she said really resonated. Like I said wierd
That poor robot. Imagine being forced to interact with abandoned toddlers and the grown-ups who really think this day care is any kind of care at all. Will the robot learn to pity the children more than it will loathe the parents?
At one point Alan tells the viewers that the science of robots is to better understand the evolution of humans.
It must have slipped his mind that it took 100s of scientist spending millions of dollars to design the robot and bring it to life. Design = creation.
Is that an Apple logo on its head?
Fascinating to see the video's of the robot walking up stairs, riding a 'surf board', etc. Amazing motion capabilities. The movie clip where the robot interacts with the kindergartners is almost spooky. If Sony can scale it up and program the bot for simple tasks like cleaning, and cooking they'll have a mega-hit on their hands.
Cool robot ping...
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